


Routine

by Margo_Kim



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: Birthday, Conversations, Female Friendship, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:11:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2845685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rita's been dying on her birthday long enough that she's fairly certain next year's birthday has rolled around. Somehow, it's not the worst birthday she's ever had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Routine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ferggirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope you have a good day! I saw that you liked female friendships (which, yes, absolutely), so I thought, hey, we don't really know anything about Hendricks except that Cage said that Rita said his name and Rita said she saw him die three hundred times, so why not just make Hendricks a woman? Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

“You can’t oversleep for your birthday,” Hendricks says. That’s what she always says, with the same cocksure smirk as she smacks Rita’s feet. “You wanna miss your big party?”

She always says that too.

Rita presses her face into the pillow, thinks about screaming, doesn’t. She got that out of her system a hundred days back. It had gone screaming, drinking, fighting, fucking, laughing, crying, screaming, and now she was at something like acceptance. It was almost like grief, in a way, some emotional process with its own strange cycle. She’d died enough and seen enough death. Why shouldn’t she grieve?

Hendricks smacks Rita’s feet again. “Come on, soldier. Getting lazy in your old age? What are you, thirty, thirty-one?”

For the first time in days and days and days, Rita does the math and raises her head. “I’m thirty-two,” she says. “I think.”

Hendricks laughs. “Old cow.”

Rita props herself up on her elbows, double-checking. She can’t be sure, of course. There’s no physical record, no way that there could be since whatever she writes would be undone the next time she shoots herself in the head, but she’s died at least three hundred times. The longest she’s ever survived was about fifty-two hours, and most days lasted at least, what, eighteen? She usually dies in the battle proper after all, so she has to survive at least as long as it takes to get there.

“Shit,” Rita says. “I think I’m thirty-two.”

Hendricks raises her hands. “Ain’t time a bitch? We got roll call in ten.” She thumps the frame of the bunk bed they share—Hendricks above, Rita below. “At least the Mimics may kill us before you’re tragically middle-aged, yeah?” She laughs again. She always starts the day so jovial. She’s forty-five and looks it, one of the oldest women in the IDF strapping themselves into those damn suits. She was forty-five when Rita had met her one shy of her own thirty-first birthday, and she is still forty-five as Rita turns thirty-two.

Rita rolls onto her back and gazes up at the picture of her family she tucked into the wire frame holding up Hendricks’ mattress. Her mother smiles down while Rita’s sister sits on the couch besides them, her daughter in her lap. Rita had made it all the way back to England one day, god bless the piss-poor security of the Chunnel, and had popped up back at home in time for dinner. They’d screamed when she’d come in. “I thought you were a ghost, Aunt Rita!” Beata said while Rita’s mum gawped. They’d been horrified she’d defected. Then they’d been horrified that she hadn’t had dinner.

That was, what, two hundred days ago? Rita’s not returned home since. It’s too hard. She sat at the dining room and laughed with her mother, argued with her sister, pampered her niece, and slipped off to the backyard to reset the day, but standing there in the summer Somerset evening, the temptation to holster her pistol and go back inside for pudding was almost unbearable. She was a soldier. She volunteered. She was a soldier, and the job was not yet done.

“Verdun’s a strange place to make a stand,” Hendricks says as always while Rita dresses. “The Germans wanted to bleed the French white here and they damn near did it, if you Brits hadn’t bled yourselves dry at the Somme as well. A lot of boys dead here for a few yards of ground.”

“Now a lot of girls too,” Rita says. “Progress.”

Hendricks laughs, she always does, and says, “ _Plus ca change, mon amie_ , _plus ca meme_ something eh? When in France—”

“Butcher French.”

Hendricks laughs again. As she always does. Still. There’s a fine line between repetition and routine, and--and not every part of the time loop is terrible.

After roll, there’s breakfast, then the bits of the days Rita’s taken to skipping, the physical training and the suit training, lunch then lessons, cleaning, more running, more jumping, more prepping, more waiting. She meets up with Dr. Carter instead, convinces him for the hundredth time that she’s in a time loop and would he please help her track her visions, remaps the battlefield with the places the Omega is _not_ , and makes it back to the garage by nine at night. Hendricks raises her eyebrow when Rita comes in, as she always does, and Rita spreads her arms and says, “It’s my birthday,” as she almost never does.

“You’ll still be doing pushups for hours,” Hendricks says, but she won’t report. She just nods her head at the gearbox as if Rita doesn’t know exactly where it is, and the two of them service their new suits one last time before Wednesday’s push. What’s supposed to be Wednesday’s push, at least. The Mimics will push them into battle a full day and a half early, with Rita and the rest of her squad rushed out to hold the onslaught back while the rest scramble. Rita’s gotten pretty good at keeping everyone alive a little longer than the odds say they should live. She’d be prouder of that if it meant a damn thing.

“Your safety,” Rita tells Hendricks, like she has everyday no matter what since the cycle began.

“Right, right.” Hendricks’ safety has a nasty habit of jamming shut, so Hendricks has a nasty habit of getting killed without firing a damn thing. “I don’t want to be the oldest corpse on the beach.”

“You won’t be,” Rita says. “I won’t let that happen.”

Hendricks gives her a look. Rita gives her a look right back. Then when they are done looking, Rita slips about a dozen more grenades into her suit than protocol allows, and then tosses an extra battery pack as well. Not for the first time, Rita wishes that she’d gotten the sword for her suit _yesterday_. She hates the cycles where she doesn’t find one. She tends to live a few minutes shorter, for one. And for another, while this isn’t _fun_ , none of this is fun, there’s at least something exhilarating about the sword.  

“Are you ready?” Hendricks asks. She means to go back to camp, to face the sergeant who is no doubt livid by this point. She can’t even imagine that this fragile peace will only last about a minute longer.

Rita has answered this every way that she can. She’s cried in Hendricks’ lap. She’s looked off stoically into the distance. She’s raged, and laughed, and fallen silent. Said yes. Said no. Said, “I don’t even know what ready means anymore,” and said, “I couldn’t be more ready. I wish I was less so.” She’s lied and told the truth and on one particularly harsh cycle that she’s not proud of, no, not at all, she pulls a grenade right here and now and let that answer the question.

“I’m tired,” Rita says. And shrugs. It is what it is. 

Hendricks punches her the arm and leaves her hand on Rita’s shoulder. “Cheer up, soldier,” she says. “The universe isn’t gonna kill you on your birthday.”

It doesn’t hurt the way it usually does, most cycles. Rita’s even starting to laugh at the absurdity of it all, when the claxons begin to sound, worry dropping across Hendricks’ face like a curtain, her hand falling to her side. “Or I spoke too soon,” Rita and Hendricks say in unison. Hendricks stares at her, Rita smiles, and the battle starts again.


End file.
